I think it would be difficult to find, in our century, many writers who were less interested in politics or public affairs than Kafka. There is no mention in his work of war or revolution, or of the ideas which may have helped to bring them about, just as there is nothing in his work which directly points to his Jewishness. The reasons why Kafka’s work was suppressed in our country were different. I don’t know if they can be simply defined, but I’d say that what was being most objected to in Kafka’s personality was his honesty.
The journalist laughed. Who wouldn’t laugh at such a reason?
She left before midnight. I hurried to get to bed. I was tired after a day which had started for me at five in the morning.
My wife curled up against me in her sleep, but I was unable to lay my thoughts to rest. A heavy paw lay chokingly on my chest.
Long ago, after I’d got well again, I was impatient every evening for the next morning. Night was like an angry dog lying in my way. Almost as soon as I was awake in the morning I’d walk past all the windows of our flat, which looked out to three points of the compass, to enjoy the distant view clothed in fresh green or white with snow. I enjoyed my work and the people at the newspaper office, I looked forward to seeing them and to those unexpected encounters which might occur. I also always opened my letters full of hope: I was forever expecting some good news, some exciting revelation or some declaration of love. And I looked forward to the books I’d read. I would read at every spare moment: in the tram, in the doctor’s waiting room, in the train, and even at mealtimes. I soaked up such a vast number of events and plots that they began to intertwine in my mind and I no longer knew which belonged where. I was enjoying life, and so I rushed from one experience to another, until I became like some obsessive eater who, out of sheer greed for the next course, is unable to savour the one he is eating. I didn’t drink or smoke – not from any puritanism but through fear that I might blunt the edge of my perception and thus be deprived of an exciting experience or a possible encounter. I had known ever since my wartime childhood that we are all living on the edge of an abyss, above a black pit into which we must fall one day, but I felt that its jaws were now receding from me and that I was tied to life by a countless number of threads which together formed a firm net on which I was, for the time being, swinging at life’s vertiginous height.
But the threads were quietly breaking, some gone rotten with age, some snapped by my own clumsiness, and others severed by other people. Or I might say: by the time we live in.
And so, every now and again when I lie down, I feel that heavy paw on my chest. In the morning, when I wake up, I want to shut my eyes again and sleep on.
Some time ago a classmate of my daughter’s came to see me, a youngster who’d already cut his wrists once, and who asked me: Why should a person live?
What could I say to him? We live because that is the law of existence, we live so that we should pass on a message whose significance we cannot quite fathom because it is mysterious and unrevealable. My father, for instance, lived for his work: whenever he’d managed to set some inert matter in motion he’d be so pleased he’d think of virtually nothing else, and for that goal he would give up all other pleasures and even his sleep. But maybe just because of that he was able to be startled when he saw the sun rise or when he heard a Schubert quintet. It also occurs to me that we live because there are a number of encounters ahead of us for the sake of which living is worthwhile. Encounters with people who will emerge when we least expect them. Or else encounters with other creatures whose lives will touch on ours with a single shy glance. What more could I say to him?
Anyway he cut his wrists again one evening, and with his hands bleeding even managed to hang himself on a tree at the northern tip of the Zofin island in the Vltava while his young friends were having a good time in the old dance hall there. My daughter cried bitterly as she told me about it, and in conclusion she said of her dead classmate: ‘But otherwise he was quite normal!’
While I was visiting my father in the afternoon his temperature suddenly began to rise steeply. His teeth were chattering and his eyes grew dim. I soaked a sheet and tried to wrap his emaciated body in the wet cloth, but he resisted, snatched the sheet from my hands and several times shouted: Take it and burn it!
Yes, I replied, I’ll take it and burn it.
Father had been imprisoned twice in his life, two different secret police forces had searched our flat – he was probably talking about some letters or papers. But then I asked after all: What is it that I should take and burn?
He looked at me with a lifeless gaze from his greyish blue eyes, which, when I was a child, were still the colour of blue lichen, and said: This fever, of course!
So I took his fever and made a little fire on the parquet floor from newspapers and some old manuscripts of mine which had been lying in a cupboard here uselessly for some thirty years. And as I was burning that fever I could see its face in the flames, it looked like the face of a pale china doll and I was waiting for it to melt or at least to crack up, but it stood up to the fire, only writhing in agony, and I noticed that the doll was crying, amidst the flames tears were glistening on her pale cheeks.
The flames had died down. I walked up to my father and touched his forehead. It was cool and moist with sweat. Dad opened his ever-seeing eyes and attempted a smile which was almost guilty. He could smile so tenderly and genuinely that even someone seeing him for the first time could not but realise that here was someone special.
I looked about me. The fever lay in ashes, its china-doll face was dry again, parched and greedy.
I wanted to fall asleep but I could feel the night creeping around me softly, like a cat out hunting, nothing mattering to it except its intended prey. I examined the threads by which life was still tying me to itself, still holding me above the black pit, its jaw so close that sometimes I could make out its smooth edge.
What tied me most firmly to life was my writing: anything I experienced would become images for me. At times they would surround me so completely that I felt I was in a different world, and my stay there filled me with happiness or at least with a sense of relief. Years ago, I persuaded myself that I would be able to communicate these images to someone, that there were even people about who were waiting for them in order to share my joys and sorrows. I did all I could to meet their supposed expectations: I was doing this not from pride or any sense of superiority but because I wanted someone to share my world with me.
Later I realised that in an age where so many were obediently and devotedly embracing the jerkish spirit, if only to avoid having to face the horsemen of the Apocalypse, very few people were interested in someone else’s images or someone else’s words.
I am still writing, putting words and sentences together to make incidents and visions. Often I labour for days over a single paragraph, I cover pages with writing, then throw them away, I keep trying to lend the most complete and the most precise expression to what I have on my mind, to avoid any misunderstanding, to make sure none of those I am addressing should feel cheated. Whenever I finish a book or a play my body rebels and punishes me with pains, and all the time I know that when I send my manuscript to the publishers I’ll get a one-sentence reply: We are returning your manuscript because it does not fit into our editorial plans. I then lend it to a few friends, and some who still refuse to submit to the jerkish spirit will probably copy it and lend it to some of their friends. I also send it abroad, provided it doesn’t get lost on the way, and it will be published there. So maybe after all – this is the thread I cling to – there may be a handful of people in the world with whom, despite all my irritations, I make contact.
I kept writing through all those years when not a single line bearing my name was allowed to be published in our country, when some of my recent friends would avoid me because they couldn’t be sure that meeting me might not cast a shadow on their respectability. I wrote stubbornly, although sometimes the weight of my loneliness lay heavily on me. I’d sit at my table and listen to the silence which was swallowing me up. I could hear nothing but a barely perceptible snapping sound as some of the individual threads broke, and I longed to discover some hope I could attach myself to. That was when she appeared. If we had met at some other time we’d probably have passed each other by, but at just that moment I raced after her like a man drugged, and it took years for me to come to again. At the same time I never stopped conducting a silent argument with her. Even when I longed for her most my words died in my throat the moment she looked at me, whenever the night separated me from her embracing and comforting glance I would compose answers to questions, reproaches, wishes and yearnings which until then I had left unanswered.
And now, as the night lazily stretched its back over me, I was continuing, by force of habit, with the silent letter in which I defended myself and tried to prove that I didn’t want to hurt her. Before throwing it into the big box full of unsent letters and wishes, full of promises, requests and half-whispered hopes I tried once more to visualise what she was doing just then, at least to visualise her room. Who knows if she was even there. I no longer knew
